


I have no use for histories

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, POV Second Person, also the desert, just sadness in the desert right here folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-28
Updated: 2015-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-23 19:04:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4888444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max Rockatansky is losing his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I have no use for histories

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry for what you're about to read.
> 
> Also I use Wordpad so if I missed an obvious typo lemme know.

It's easy to be empty in the desert. Easy to let things drain away and be replaced by the howl of the wind, the heat, the smell of the sand.

You used to know oceans; plotted on a map, the trajectory of your life has moved inexorably inland, and you can't remember the last time you saw so much as a pond that wasn't filthy and alkaline. But the saltpan smells so familiar it drags the memory up from the deep pit of your brain, and you wonder if you turned back, if things would be the same back there.

(Is the ocean even still there?)

The desert isn't as quiet as you thought it would be. The thrum of engines seems to follow you everywhere. The oil pumps you stumble across, that no gang has deemed valuable enough to claim, wail and groan with every motion, the sullen sound of overworked machinery.

And when you stop and lay low, there are living things as well; mutated lizards and skinny carrion birds, investigating you, sizing you up. Wild beasts, that have no love for humankind except as a potential food source.

It's a fair calculus -- in this world you have to grab what you can while you can -- but it's been such a long time since you saw even an animal that didn't think of you as potential prey.

(When was the last time you saw a dog?)

It's easier than it should be, to let these pieces of yourself drain away into the dust. To _forget_ , to move from moment to moment thinking of nothing at all, letting it all blow through you like a sandstorm.

Your ghosts won't let you forget everything, of course. But once in a while you lose even the knowledge of why they are chasing you, and for a blessed moment you don't _know_ what you did to them; the list of the people you have hurt stops running over and over again through your brain, and you can just exist like an animal, scrabbling for a few more seconds of existence.

Life isn't kind, though. They always come back, and when they do go away, they take away more and more of yourself with them. _Without us, you're nothing, Max._

(Which is one thing they won't free you from -- your name. It is a blessing to be just "blood-bag" or "Fool", to be forgotten when your use is over.)

You've lost so _much_ , and what remains is so shattered you'll never piece it back together. 

Your ghosts can't _touch_ you, most of the time, but they can do so much worse.

_"Everyone used to have a show."_

You think, _I didn't -- she did_ , but who is she? You remember her hair, dark and lovely in the summer sun. You remember her hands, you remember _I'm crazy about you_ , you remember her smile.

What was her name?

You remember music. You remember the smell of smoke that wasn't from burning garbage or burning flesh. You remember trying not to laugh. You remember wanting to leave, but not wanting to leave -- someone -- behind. Who? Why?

You remember friendship. A time before everyone was just looking to use you, or before you realized that was how things are.

Did you ever have a _friend_?

You can't remember his name.

The world has moved on from soft things like these. You've lost the luxury of even remembering many of them, until they flash across the black sky of your mind like a satellite.

(A music box -- _I remember that_.)

You remember a room full of green, of plants whose only purpose was ornamental. Just thinking of the _water_ such a place would require makes you wonder if you're remembering something that never happened. There was never a time of such careless luxury, was there?

You remember expanses of open water and green forest, landscapes you used to take for granted. You remember having different sets of clothes, and throwing them out when they got worn. You remember not worrying where your next meal was coming from, or if there was going to be one.

You remember being _happy_.

You remember having a _reason_ to be happy.

This is all you've got; tiny, polished memories that shine all the brighter in the darkness of what you've become. Much of the time you doubt that they're real. That the person you remember being was ever real. That the world was ever any different.

If things haven't always been this way -- if you were alive then -- if you were happy -- why didn't you die when they changed? You had no ghosts chasing you then. Have they kept you alive for their own purposes? It wouldn't be much of a change from everyone else you remember knowing.

Why can't you _die_?

Wherever the world you remember has gone, you want to go there. To stop all this from happening over again. The desolation of your world now echoes the emptiness inside you. Did you make it this way?

Could you have stopped any of it from happening?

You don't like that thought, when it comes around. Being a tool for the use of others disquiets you -- if you're important to someone, that means you can let them down, and you _will_ , inevitably -- but it's better than the thought that you could have chosen a better path than this.

Were you a better person back then?

You're trying, as hard as you can, to do your best -- maybe then the ghosts will be satisfied, maybe then they'll let you die -- but there is a deeper cruelty than death, in this wasteland of a world.

There is the cruelty of living. Of seeing people who trusted you die, over and over again, knowing that you sent them to their deaths. Of being unable to end the cycle. Of being a puppet of something larger than yourself, because it's the only way you know to go on.

But there's just enough brightness in this future to keep you going. Enough reminders that you are not the only one carrying the memory of a better past, the will to rise above this existence of scratching at the desert dirt, the strength to say _no_.

You are only good for killing. Your touch brings people pain. Your passage through lives inevitably ruins them, and this is the one thing continuous between your ghost of a past and your horror of a present.

_You are an instrument of death._

It might be better not to be a person at all. There is a cold mercy in being seen as a resource, not a man. Even to be an animal might be better than this: animals aren't _conscious_ of the pain they cause.

Yet you go on, because you're a valuable-enough resource to keep being used. People seem to _see_ something in you, even though you are an unknown quantity, uncertain, unreliable. You are nothing compared to an engine, a gun, a tank of gas.

Perhaps that's where your value lies; when you drain a tank of gas, it is gone forever, used up. Even draining your blood isn't enough to kill _you_. It all grows back. Regeneration is a curse.

You remember the joy of _giving_ instead of _being taken from_. Of having enough of yourself that you could afford to give some away. Of trusting other people not to destroy those pieces of you.

Some parts of this new world aren't so bad -- the desert sunrise, the singing of the wind across the flat land, the air rushing around you as you drive. But that doesn't keep you from missing the old world, when you can remember it.

You remember giving comfort to someone who was hurt -- _no one's going to hurt you any more_. You remember being able to depend on the people around you, being able to count on yourself in turn.

Some days your memory fails you entirely. You have your body, scarred and broken. You have eyes that do not always see what's there. You have the knowledge that something is missing.

Your best days are behind you. The world has moved on, and everything is in flux except the things you wish would leave you behind. Here at the end of all things, you can't even shake off your name.

It's not always so bad. Sometimes there are enough parts of who you used to be that you can make something like a whole. Enough to remember how to be kind. Enough to give freely of yourself for the first time in a long time.

It's easy enough to give of your body. To be a distraction, an extra body to soak up bullets. It's harder to give up your name, something of your heart, when you know that the act of knowing you gets people killed.

But it's not hard at all to give up your blood because you _want_ to, not because you're forced to. It's not hard to brush the dust from her face -- if she dies, she won't die feeling grit in her eyes. And it's not hard to give her your name, in return for all she's given you.

_Max. My name is Max. That's my name._


End file.
